We are Live!

This is where we’ll experiment with new formats and new voices, with podcasts, interviews, and plainly weird shit between the “official” editions of the quarterly magazine. Who knows? Maybe next year the podcast is old hat, and Chapo Trap House brays from the dustbin of history.

We feature three new voices. Mark Bray, the author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook(Melville House), talks with Bruce Robbins and me about the extreme politics of our time. Tune in to part two of our interview when it goes online on Saturday.

Natalie Frazier, who was only last year a film student at Northwestern, writes of her close, angry encounter with Spike Lee—of how it made her think again about the South Side, where she grew up, and about the politics of representation.

And on Friday, Christopher Layton, an undergraduate at Rutgers University, explains why being a History major is better than being a junkie in the first of our “First Person” features. Now there’s a defense of the humanities.

In addition to regular critical reviews of the most provocative literature, film, music, and media, Politics/Letters Live features commentary from the historian and author Matthew Barlow (whose new book Griffintown: Identity and Memory in an Irish Diaspora Neighbourhood is just out from UBC Press), and the Barcelona-based scholar, architect, and critic Rafael Gomez-Moriana’s musings on the built environment in “Criticalista.”

We have much more in store for Politics/Letters Live, so stay tuned. Meanwhile, if you have an idea or a perspective that you want to go LIVE… send us something!